1He’s taught a lot of famous central bankers and economists

Mr. Fischer has shaped some of the best minds in the field, teaching the likes of outgoing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (whose thesis he oversaw), European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, former Obama advisers Lawrence Summers and Christina Romer, and Greg Mankiw, an economic adviser to President George W. Bush, among them. What’s more, he’s pretty well beloved by his former students and well-respected by the central-banking community more broadly for both his academic work and policy experience. (See a photo of him with many of his famous students.) At an event last month, Mr. Bernanke called him one of the most influential teachers he had. Interestingly, Mr. Fischer in his career has straddled both sides of the academic economic divide — he taught at the University of Chicago, known for its advocacy of free markets and laisez-faire economics and then MIT, where skeptics of that view flourished and scholars sought to advance the work of Keynesian economics and a view that government intervention can help economies.

Stanley Fischer with Ben Bernanke and Christina Romer

2He led the Bank of Israel

For more than eight years, Mr. Fischer served as the governor of the Bank of Israel. His handling of monetary policy was credited with helping steer Israel’s economy through the turbulence of the 2008 financial crisis nearly unscathed and into growth while the U.S. and Europe struggled in the aftermath. In 2010, he was named by Euromoney Magazine as Central Bank Governor of the Year. The job certainly kept his political skills sharp: he had to field advice from citizens even while running on the beach, he told the Journal in 2008.

3He's got loads of crisis experience

In the run up to naming Janet Yellen to be the next Fed chief, there was a lot of talk about how President Obama wanted someone who could deal with international crises. Mr. Fischer can certainly help Ms. Yellen out in that department if the need arises. As the No. 2 at the IMF, Mr. Fischer helped guide the global economy through the 1997-98 financial crisis that wreaked havoc in Asia, Latin America and Russia.

President Obama wanted someone who could deal with international crises.

4He's Been Skeptical of Fed Communication

Mr. Bernanke and other Fed officials have made it clear they want to pull back from the Fed’s $85 billion-per-month bond-buying program and toward another tool — so-called forward guidance, or statements the central bank makes about the likely course of future policy — to support the economy. Mr. Fischer earlier this year said he had serious reservations about the usefulness of forward guidance. “You can’t expect the Fed to spell out what it’s going to do,” Mr. Fischer said. “Why? Because it doesn’t know.” That should make for some interesting policy debates around the FOMC table.

6.5%
The unemployment rate the Fed sets as its threshold for when to begin discussions on raising rates.

5He called QE 'Dangerous' but 'Necessary'

Mr. Fischer endorsed the Fed’s$85 billion-per-month bond-buying program, known as quantitative easing or QE, during an interview at the WSJ CEO Council last month. But he stressed that the Fed’s extraordinary efforts are not without risks, which the central bank needs to watch closely. “Without the Fed, we’d have had a much deeper recession. Without the extraordinary things that it’s done, the economy would be in much worse shape today and we need to remember that. Precisely how to get out of it, at what speed to get out of it, is a much harder thing to measure and to calculate,” he said.